NSW releases draft location data strategy

The NSW Government is under-utilising the spatial data it has on hand and plans to kick off a program of advocacy and coordination designed to better inform the policy development process.

“At present, the benefits of location intelligence are not being fully realised across NSW,” a draft location intelligence strategy released this week stated.

“There remains too much duplication of effort collecting similar data, too little reuse and too few linkages across key datasets which is costly and inefficient."

NSW has identified a number of actions it hopes will get the ball rolling, starting with ensuring the location data being used is consistent and accurate.

The draft plan suggests the Department of Finance and Services (DFS) begin work immediately on a business case supporting the development of a government-wide “Addressing Verification Web Service” which will “validate and spatially enable addresses captured by agencies in the delivery of government services”.

The DFS would also become responsible for writing up a whole-of-government procedure for how agencies should update, check and publish location-enabled data sets.

Once it has laid this groundwork, the NSW Government will identify its top 20 datasets in terms of downloads from the data.nsw website, and make sure that all 20 are spatially enabled and publically available. This is expected to be completed towards the end of next year.

NSW has also revealed plans to lobby education providers to start developing skills in building and location intelligence.

From the beginning of 2015 the government plans to “engage providers of mainstream business, management and creative arts education and training services to include location intelligence subjects into their curriculum”.

The plan draws upon ideas shared at two government and industry think tanks held on August 2012 and March 2013.

Like many of its previous ICT proposals, the NSW government has opened the draft plan up to discussion via the ‘have your say’ portal. It will take feedback until 25 October.